Broadband in France has been getting progressively better. About a year ago services offering 8mbps ADSL were being offered by the various DSL providers. This year this has now been upgraded to ADSL2 at 20Mbps or so (I get about 19Mbps according to my ADSL router).
But that is nothing,
Infoworld reports that in Paris France Telecom is trialing a service which is 100 times faster:
Paris homes test very high-speed broadband
France Télécom lays fiber to 100 homes in trial of connection with a maximum data rate of 2.5Gbps
...For €70 ($88) a month, customers participating in the fiber trial get Internet access, digital television broadcasts, and unlimited telephone calls over an optical connection with a theoretical maximum data rate of 2.5Gbps downstream, and 1.2Gbps upstream. The price includes installation and activation of equipment at the customers' homes, and the first two months' access are free.
During the trial, France Télécom also plans to offer interactive television services and videoconferencing, and will test new content-sharing and gaming services, it said.
This is one of the first real tests of Passive Optical Networking, a technology which I would have thought was more relevant to businesses than home usage, since the bandwidth offered seems excessive for current applications.
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